Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is estimated to affect 170 million individuals worldwide. This disease is primarily transmitted through contaminated blood products. Although its spread has been slowed as a result of improvements in blood screening in many countries, it remains the leading cause of liver disease-related deaths in the world. For example, it results in up to 10,000 deaths annually in the U.S. alone. In the absence of new antiviral therapies to combat this disease, the death rate is expected to triple over the next 2 decades.
Current treatments based on interferon-alpha have low success rates, particularly for genotype-1 infections that predominate in Europe, Japan, and the U.S. Also, they are expensive and poorly received by patients. Thus, there is a need to develop better therapeutic agents for treating HCV infection.